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Thursday, March 06, 2008

Nesting

I've been in a nesting phase since the beginning of the year and I have to say that it's been nice. Slow...but nice. I managed to clean out a couple of closets and have three trash bags filled with junk ready for Goodwill. I need to still box up my old dishware and flatware and donate those too. And I still have a lot of work left to do...but I see progress and that makes me happy.

The last two or three weeks, I've been in a decorating phase. I got a new bookcase that matches my big bookcase and I'll probably spend some time this weekend actually organizing my books and some knick knacks on the bookcase so it looks nice and homey instead of all barren and desolate like it looks now.

Monday night, Claire came over and helped me with my new wine cabinet and futon cover. First the good...the futon cover is really nice! It's very simple and it's a light tan with gold threads weaved into a type of tweed fabric. I liked that it was darker that my current ivory one and that there was some sort of texture. Plus, my red pillows still go with it and it matches with the rug and the furniture in my living room. I only had to go to four futon shops to find it!! Once I did find it, I found out that it came with matching tan pillows that were nice but I really like my red ones and I pondered skipping it all together but the cover was the one I liked the most. I figure that when I get tired of the red pillows, I have an alternate look with these tan ones the cover came with.

Now the bad...the wine cabinet. It's a very nice wine cabinet and I'd be ecstatic with it if there wasn't some sort of defect in the one I received! I bought it at Crate and Barrel and for $300 and something that they are forcing me to put together, I would hope that they would at least inspect things before they box them out and send them off to the stores. So on Monday, we picked up the cabinet from the loading dock at the store, drove to the apartment and dragged all the pieces up to my 3rd floor walk-up apartment. That's right...three floors...no elevator...50 steps. Living on the third floor doesn't bother me at all...only when I got to get furniture up there. So we're upstairs with everything...my arms are screaming and that reminds me I should work out more and do weights but whatever. Claire and I get to putting the sucker together. We do the sides, then the shelves, than the back, then the bottom and attach the legs. We are almost done. Only the top, tray and drawer left to go. We get the top situated and Claire is screwing the blots in and then she says there's a problem. The very last bolt to go in won't. She tries...I try. The sucker is not going in. So we take the top off and measure and that side is .25 inches off from all the others. Great. So close and yet so far. I called Crate and Barrell and told them that I was having a problem with the assembly and that I believed their was a defect on the top (it can actually be the side so I have to research my theory a little bit more). The guy on the phone was very nice and amiable and at that point...I was more tired than annoyed. Apparently, I bought the last wine cabinet in that model and they are waiting for a new shipment. When the new shipment comes in, I will have to swap out pieces. It was a relief that they wouldn't expect me to take the whole thing back. It took me two weeks to arrange with Claire a day that would work for both of us. It would probably take me another two weeks to figure out when we could schedule a full cabinet swap. But just one piece, I can handle that easily. So hopefully, I can get this all done and figured out by the end of the weekend.

Because of the wine cabinet debaucle, I now have wooden wine cabinet pieces and box remnants all over my apartment. It looks like I went two steps back in the organization front instead of one step forward. But once the wine cabinet snafu gets taken care of, things will be loads better.

Maybe over the weekend I'll take pictures of the new "improvements" in the apartment. The bookcase and wine cabinet are dark wood so it won't show up well in evening pictures. I'll try to devote some daylight time to take some pictures of that and my progress on Sweet Dreams then. The tree is now all stitched on that. Yay!!